a little better

Thus far, the worst of the bad weather has held off and it's just cold and wet. (It may well get icy overnight, but I hope if the roads are actually icy they just cancel tomorrow's classes)

I got the exams written today, and I might be able to get a start on reading next week's paper for Advanced Biostats between lab and my meeting.

I also had a better lunch. On a whim, I had bought some Lance brand "whole grain cracker and cheddar cheese" sandwich things. I used to love the cheese-and-peanutbutter cracker things (cheesy crackers, spread with peanut butter) but I don't dare try to eat peanut butter any more. (I really need to see if I can get tested for a food allergy to it, I mean without doing a "challenge test." I'm not 100% convinced I'm allergic because it's rare for adults to develop an allergy, but the fact that I got a little bit of a scratchy throat the last time I ate some was concerning, so I cut it out of my diet). They were good. I'm sure they're not good FOR you, but few things that taste very good are.

I also had a cup of tea which helped me be a little less tired, though I will probably crash hard once I get home this afternoon.It wasn't great tea, but I had some bags in my office (Lipton Bavarian Wild Berry, which has to be at least 5 years old). And I was SO COLD at that point. And tea is kind of comforting even when it's not that great. (It would be very hard to do proper tea over here; no way of using up milk fast enough before it spoiled, using it only once a day, and I don't have space to brew from loose tea).

I also did a bit of dumb indulgent shopping. There was a nice, plush, Disney-store style version of the ORIGINAL (aka: 1970s era movie) Pete's Dragon (Elliott) up for sale on Amazon, and....well, I have great affection for that movie despite not having seen it for years. (It was one of the movies I saw in the theater in its original run. Probably at the theater in the old Chapel Hill Mall, that was usually where my family went to first-run movies. My parents saw a LOT of Disney movies....but I guess that was fine with them?)

Yes, there was a remake a few years ago but I don't really acknowledge its existence, it's very different, I guess (modernized); the version that came out when I was 8 (so: kind of the sweet spot for loving a movie like that very, very much) is the one I think of when you say "Pete's Dragon." (I always preferred, even as a kid, films set in other times or places to ones set more or less in the present day, which apparently the remake was, and of course they eliminated the "hillbilly family keeping Pete as an indentured servant" subplot)

I had....and still have, I guess....a stuffed one up at my mom's house* but it's one of those weird tricot fabric toys that was popular in the 1970s - I think I got it on a rare, rare trip to an FAO Schwarz not long after we had seen the movie. Now, the idea of a tricot-fabric plushie sets off some of my sensory issues (running a hand over his back when you have dry skin and it snags, ew) but since it was Elliott, in stuffed-animal form, I put up with it then.

This version will (I hope) be a definite upgrade. He looks like he's made out of minky, which is kind of wonderful: minky is a nice fabric and it won't have that same weird feeling as the tricot did.

He's supposed to arrive Friday. So at least there's that.

(*It is still kind of a wrench not to be able to say "my parents' house" any more, but I strive for accuracy)

But yeah. This week has been a surprisingly hard week after what amounted to a pretty good weekend. And the thing is nothing is so objectively terrible, it's just.....lots of work and lots of being tired and sometimes powering through it is just hard.

I think tonight I am going to have a simple dinner of something (I have a frozen mac and cheese and while that's not great for you either, at least I can heat up a couple servings of vegetables to eat with it to redeem it a bit nutritionally) and I'm going to take a warm bath and go to bed early. Even if that means I get relatively little knitting or anything else done. It's cold, I'm tired, this month has already felt a decade long, and I need some comfort.